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This chapter discusses a city created by a cinema and a cinema created by the city, with emphasis on the dynamic interplay of these two. In this chapter the focus is on the last three decades, from 1977 to 2007, a period wherein the symbols and social expressions that were used to delineate the city have grown in strength while some others have consolidated to form Mexico’s current identity. In some of the cases, these symbols were placed in the film intentionally, while others seemed like they appeared through chance. The development of cinema in Mexico was bound with the developments of the city. Mexican cinema has played an important role as a mirror that reflected the developments within the city. Through the medium of film, the moving image became the most useful tool for visualizing the immeasurable wholeness of the city. In this chapter, the most defining moments that have found their way into the Mexican cinema are discussed. These events are the 1985 earthquake, the realities of globalization, and the defeat of the PRI in the 2000 elections. These are interwoven into narratives and images that explore dislocation, isolation and different forms of resistance.

This chapter revisits the popular comedies of Mario “Cantinflas” Moreno from the golden age of Mexican cinema and argues that these films are not simply escapist and ideologically suspect but represent peripheral spaces of subversive difference that in their cultural and historical specificity cannot be easily co-opted by a cultural-imperialist center. Cantinflas’s humor is characterized by his linguistic contortionism, or cantinflismo, in which he says plenty without saying anything, a verbal nonsense that sidesteps narrative registers and affords a bodily engagement through laughter that relies on particular cultural codes and learned structures of feeling. This chapter provincializes classical Hollywood cinema by arguing for a peripheral vision modeled on the comedic practice of the relajo, which plays with the classical spatial arrangement of screen and theater space. This chapter examines the comedian’s quick verbal play in addition to formal devices, editing techniques, and doubled narrative structures that “sidestep” on multiple levels.

This chapter traces an enthusiastic and nationally inflected welcome for Hitchcock's films in Mexico City. On the one hand, how Hitchcock's movies were marketed to highlight melodrama, rather than crime or mystery, circles back to themes of humour and melodramatic hybridisation, seen earlier in the Almodóvar chapter, but on the other hand, it also locates them within the specific context of the Golden Age of Mexican cinema. Emphasising the impact of a national narrative on film reception, this chapter details some surprising revelations regarding how Hitchcock's movies became part of a major historical event—Trotsky's arrival in Mexico City—as well as how they fit into the narrative of the county's economic development and progress, especially through the expansion of movie houses and airline travel.

This chapter discusses the present state of research on music in Mexican cinema and why a study is so important. Building on frameworks of nationalism and cultural identity in Mexico the author utilizes the concept of “cultural synchresis,” which draws upon sound theorist Michel Chion’s model of synchresis—the combination of synchronism and synthesis that arises when an auditory phenomenon and a visual phenomenon occur at the same time. Using this model, the author investigates how repetitions of film—as bodies of music, the moving image, and narrative working in tandem—molded diverse codes of national identity construction aimed and recognized by urban audiences. This juxtaposition of the narrative, moving image (which encompasses the costuming, setting, lighting, etc.), and sound (which includes diegetic and non-diegetic music and sound design) produced encoded messages representing specific interpretations of Mexicanidad (the cultural identity of the Mexican people) that impacted collective memory.

This chapter reframes noir from the semi-peripheral space of Mexican cinema. The chapter studies noir in Mexican cinema and literature in the context of the history of Fordist capitalism, American-style modernization, and contemporary neoliberalism. Drawing on readings of a range of different films, the chapter charts the historical arc of Mexican noir as a cultural form that captures the affective registers of Mexican capitalist modernity on three levels: first, fear and loss in relation to the tension between capitalism and tradition in post-revolutionary Mexico; second, a globalization of affective registers as noir connects Mexican to transnational circuits of affect and emotion; third, the creation of an affective polity through the deployment of sentimentalism and melodrama as part of the emergent mediatization and commoditization of the masses’ affects in the new urban settings.